Digital factory building blocks

Important results from the project

The vehicle industry faces a great challenge when changing towards environmentally safe vehicles while keeping its competitiveness. A fundamental change in the production of new products with new materials and technologies will be required. Our vision is to, by efficient and coordinated use of digital models in virtual manufacturing, make industry effective when adapting existing, and developing new manufacturing lines. The goal is to create libraries of digital factory building blocks, i.e. production resource models that can be used for various applications and be kept updated and accurate throughout the whole lifecycle of production. Such libraries will contribute to a faster and more correct evaluation of manufacturability, produced quality, environmental impact etc beforehand: it will be possible to achieve fast installations or reconfigurations and ramp-up of production with high overall-equipment-efficiency.

Expected long term effects

Production resource models that can be used for various applications, and be kept updated and accurate throughout the whole lifecycle of production will enable more extensive utilization of virtual tools. This interoperability in-between different software architectures and also in-between real world systems and virtual tools is considered a key enabler for, firstly, productive manufacturing engineering. Secondly, achieving a more seamless integration in-between the virtual world and the shop floor, i.e. to utilize the virtual work in the real world processes. Thirdly, providing data in useable format in order to enable utilization of the virtual technologies for optimization of the manufacturing processes environmental impact before production starts. Main deliverables: - Demonstrators of how to structure resource models in selected industrial applications, within the IT-systems of companies now, and in a longer perspective. - An approach for representing resource models based on a combination of formats. A terminology for integrating building block information from different sources. - Methodology for reuse of historical data in analyses of new production systems. - Specification of future digital analysis requirements, including a set of prioritized environmental analyses as well as the information and parameters required. - Documentation of possibilities, specific context, and needs within the supplier industry. Description of ways to increase efficiency and their use of digital factory analyses.

Approach and implementation

The project combines the academic competence in resource modeling based on neutral formats with the practial formats, needs and experiences within industry. It is ´demonstrator driven´ and is divided into 5 work packages, managed by Chalmers, IVF and KTH respectively: WP1 (IVF): Industrial targets and parameters maps needs for digital analysis and requirements, including the possible environmental analyses, to guide the case studies and demonstrators. WP2 (KTH): Digital building block library specifies how to model the digital building blocks based on a combination of selected neutral standards and industrial formats. WP3 (Chalmers): Integration of operational data to define how to feed back and include manufacturing data in digital factory and building blocks WP4 (IVF): Digital factory work method for suppliers industry which considers the context of suppliers by establishing a two-way communication. WP5 (KTH): Demonstrator - plans and implements a set of demonstrators, requests results from the other WPs